R Introduction

The racial injustice has been a long known social problems in the United States. By studying the data of incarceration trends. I want to acquire more insights on this social issue. This dataset is constructed by Vera Institute of Justice, and the project is founded by the Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust. It contains the jail and prison across the United States since 1970. By studying the data, I found that in the most recent year, the state with highest incarnation ratio is Louisiana, with a ratio of 0.625%. 0.0062532 Also in the most recent year, the white population is 60.3%, 0.6032086 corresponding white jail population ratio is 46.9%. 0.4694743 On the other hand, there is only about 13.5% black population in the US. rblack_pop_ratio$ratio`However, the black jail population is 33.6%. 0.3358272 Which is almost 250% of the total black population ratio.

Variable Comparison Chart

variable_comparison

This chart is created to discover the relationship between the overall black jail ratio and the overall white jail ratio. The chart displays that the white jail ratio has been increasing slowly and steadily in the past three decades. However, there is a significant drop in the overall black jail rate in the past decade.

Map

map

The map displays the the ratio of black jail population vs. white jail population. It’s interesting to see that the region with lowest and highest white jail rate as we discovered from the first chart (South and northeast) tends to have a higher black vs. white jail ratio. It means the black jail population in these regions seems to be much higher than the white jail population.